This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Cervantes's Don Quixote highlights dramatic changes in pedagogy and scholarship in the last thirty years: today, critics and teachers acknowledge that subject position, cultural identity, and political motivations afford multiple perspectives on the novel, and they examine both literary and sociohistorical contextualization with fresh eyes. Part 1, "Materials," contains information about editions of Don Quixote, a history and review of the English translations, and a survey of critical studies and Internet resources. In part 2, "Approaches," essays cover such topics as the Moors of Spain in Cervantes's time; using film and fine art to teach his novel; and how to incorporate psychoanalytic theory, satire, science and technology, gender, role-playing, and other topics and techniques in a range of twenty-first-century classroom settings.

The satirical story of the man from La Mancha has been popular for nearly 400 years.

This study offers a reading of Don Quixote, with comparative material from Golden Age history and Cervantes life, to argue that his greatest work was not just the hilariously comic entertainment that most of his contemporaries took it to be. Rather, it belongs to a subversive tradition of writing that grew up in sixteenth-century Spain and which constantly questioned the aims and standards of the imperial nation state that Counter-reformation Spain had become from the point of view of Renaissance humanism. Prime consideration needs to be given to the system of Spanish censorship at the time, run largely by the Inquisition albeit officially an institution of the crown, and its effect on the cultural life of the country. In response, writers of poetry and prose fiction -- strenuously attacked on moral grounds by sections of the clergy and the laity -- became adept at camouflaging heterodox ideas through rhetoric and imaginative invention. Ironically, Cervantes success in avoiding the attention of the censor by concealing his criticisms beneath irony and humour was so effective that even some twentieth-century scholars have maintained Don Quixote is a brilliantly funny book but no more. Bob Britton draws on recent critical and historical scholarship -- including ideas on cultural authority and studies on the way Cervantes addresses history, truth, writing, law and gender in Don Quixote -- and engages with the intellectual and moral issues that this much-loved writer engaged with. The summation and appraisal of these elements within the context of Golden Age censorship and the literary politics of the time make it essential reading for all those who are interested in or study the Spanish language and its literature.

In response to the classic question whether Don Quixote is true to life, Felix Martinez-Bonati defines it as an unrealistic allegory of realism. He maintains that Cervantes's novel presents an ironized universe of literature that plays with the contradictions of traditional wisdom and the variety and limitations of literary forms—including those of verisimilitude. Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics, on the idealist and romantic traditions that originate in Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Coleridge, and on contemporary critical theory, Martinez-Bonati describes the stylistic matrix of Don Quixote as a combination of semirealism, romance fantasy, and comedy. He provides fresh insights into the character of Cervantes's imagination, the composition and unity of Don Quixote, and its generic structure, rhetorical force, and metafictional intentionality.

Since its publication in the early seventeenth century, Don Quixote has become a classic of world literature, and its hero a symbol of romantic aspiration and absurdity. Even today, Cervantess mad knight continues to reach out and hook readers psyches. Don Quixote is the story of a verisimilar literary character, whose rich and conflicted inner life and encounters with the world around him became the prototype for the modern novel from Tom Jones to Lolita. Johnson situates the Quixote within its relevant historical and cultural context, including the uniquely Spanish form of the general European dialectic of Old versus New. The mad heros encounters with the world expose the shaky foundations of that conflictive society. Don Quixote was a revolutionary ideological statement in its own time, and has proved to be a revolutionary literary statement for all time. Johnson shows how Cervantes challenges the official poetics of the late sixteenth century, and simultaneously anticipates virtually every aspect of the trendiest theorizing of the late twentieth century.

This book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world’s greatest literary hero takes place in film, theatre, and literature. To accomplish this task, eighteen scholars from the USA, Canada, Spain, and Great Britain have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. For the first time, Don Quixote is discussed from the point of re-accentuation, i.e. having in mind one of the key Bakhtinian concepts that will serve as a theoretical framework. A primary objective was therefore to articulate, relying on the concept of re-accentuation, that the history of the novel has benefited enormously from the re-accentuation of Don Quixote helping us to shape countless iconic novels from the eighteenth century, and to see how Cervantes’s title character has been reinterpreted to suit the needs of a variety of cultures across time and space.